Me, Myself, and Bob: A True Story About Dreams, God, and Talking Vegetables

by Phil Vischer

It’s interesting to note that only one out of three companies that makes the Inc. list repeats its appearance the following year. What happens to the rest? Many see their growth stall, never to fully recover. Others simply cease to exist. Vanish. You see, when a small company experiences extremely rapid growth, it soon ceases to be a “small company.” Yet just because it no longer qualifies as “small” doesn’t necessarily mean it is now “big.” In other words, just because you’re no longer “Tim’s Software Hut” doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “Microsoft.” And somewhere in the middle, many, many companies fail. Inc. magazine noticed this dynamic and had several business researchers look into it. What emerged was a picture of a treacherous period in any business’s growth when a company finds itself “too big to be small yet too small to be big.” The researchers dubbed it “No Man’s Land.” “No Man’s Land” threat number one, according to Inc.’s experts: Small companies, experiencing rapid initial growth, attempt to make the leap to being “big” without having a clear plan for sustaining that growth. What got you to $10 million in sales won’t necessarily take you to $100 million. We sold more than six million VeggieTales videos in 1998. Unable to imagine selling more than that, I entered 1999 assuming Big Idea’s continued growth would depend on expanding into other areas like television and feature films. Unfortunately, the executive team I put together